Parents, DJs navigate new wave of pop hits with unprintable titles

By TIM O'BRIEN Staff writer

Updated 8:54 am, Sunday, February 27, 2011

This is a story about a word we cannot print. Teens know all about it from some of today's biggest pop stars. And parents try to balance the reality that their children are increasingly exposed to it with teaching them not to say it.

Cee-Lo Green's retro soul groove, repeatedly referred to at the Grammy Awards as "the song otherwise known as 'Forget You,'" kicked off the trend last summer by wedding upbeat R&B with the bluest of kiss-offs.

Green's song is one of three on the charts now with the word we cannot print in its title. Pink's song may be called "Perfect" on the radio, but the CD cover precedes it with the same unmentionable as an adverb. And fans hearing Enrique Iglesias singing "tonight I'm loving you" on the radio might wonder why he precedes it by saying he doesn't mean to be rude. Hint: The album version is much cruder.

Britney Spears had to edit the chorus of her 2009 song "If U Seek Amy" for radio, too. If you don't get why, say the title aloud slowly but not near anyone with sensitive ears.

Pop songs have contained curse words for years, especially in rap, but until now song titles rarely included profanity -- and ones that did never got airplay, even in edited form.

"There is less censorship. You can use it or else some other word that everyone understands is that word (think Jack Ingram's "Love You") and still get on the radio, on television and in newspapers," said Richard Lachmann, a professor of sociology at University at Albany. "For kids, it was possible to grow up and not hear that word or only hear it from other kids. I was a kid in the '60s, and I just didn't hear that word."

When he finally heard it in middle school from another student, he said, he was told it was not something to repeat at home.

Christine Van Ullen of Cohoes said her son, who turned 16 this week, knows the real word in Green's song but still knows she doesn't want to hear him say it. Still, she finds herself less shocked than she once would have been.

"Years ago when suck became part of the vernacular, I had a harder time with it," she said. "I have more of a problem with a general lack of civility and morals on the part of public officials than I do something like this."

She said a congressman shouting "You lie" during a State of the Union address, politicians in sex scandals, people cheating on their spouses and society objectifying women are more disturbing to her than a single foul word.

"I might feel very differently if I had an 8- or 10-year-old who was listening to them," Van Ullen said.

Kim Verner of Clarksville has two children exactly those ages. She says she and her musician husband have a simple rule: Unless their children write a Grammy-nominated song or are being chased by monsters like in the movies where they heard the word, they are not allowed to use it.

"If they are being chased by a vampire, zombie, werewolf or bears, they are allowed to use the f-word," she said. "If they are not being chased by one of those creatures, they are not allowed to use that word. It's a grown-up word that kids are not allowed to use."

To set an example, she and her husband pay a $1 fine if a curse word escapes their lips -- and their kids have to do the same.

"We model what is appropriate for the kids, and we're not a particularly conservative family," she said. "That word in itself is far less offensive to me than some of the lyrics of some songs that are encouraging really misogynistic behavior."

Brian Cody, a DJ for top 40 radio station FLY92 since 1993, said music tends to follow trends, and Green's hit may be inspiring others.

"It seems to come in waves. It's a copycat world as far as the industry goes," he said. "If it's working for one particular artist, people are going to jump on it."

The station even aired a bleeped-out parody, "(expletive) This," mocking the winter weather that was a hit with listeners. Most songs with expletives can easily be edited to remove the offensive term.

"The Cee-Lo song is very different," Cody said. "It's very unique that it's the hook of the song. It's pretty risky for an artist to release that to the radio because it can do more harm than good. It's so catchy it's impossible for radio to deny it."

While radio won't air the original version, Cody said, that doesn't mean teens don't know what it is. With iPods and the Internet, they have ready access to the original.

"When I go out to these school dances, the kids are singing the real version," he said. "Even if we censor it on the air, it's accessible to the kids."

"Every society has taboos, and some of them are taboos on what you can do and some of them are taboos on what you can say," he said.

Using the word is a way to show a singer is willing to break the rules, he said.

The growth of cable television in America's homes also has made the word more readily heard. Once one of the seven dirty words George Carlin famously said you could not say on broadcast television, today it is commonplace on HBO and other cable channels.

Cee-Lo Green is not the first artist to record a song with the curse in the title.

In 1988, the rappers N.W.A. released a song called "(expletive) tha Police." It got attention but not airplay.

Human beings invented language, of course, and there is no innate reason that duck, buck and tuck should be perfectly innocuous but one changed consonant should shock your grandmother. But curse words were created for a reason, too, and repeated usage robs them of their power.

"The taboo quality of words gets washed out if they are frequently used by the public, and new words become taboo," Broadwell said. "The standards may be changing, but 50 years from now there will still be things you can't say on the radio."

Share your thoughts about swear words, pop music and teens -- and see a family-friendly version of the video for Cee-Lo Green's song "Forget You" -- on the Arts Talk blog at http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts.